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A Hard Lesson Re-Learned

This morning I am so down and depressed. I am so angry at myself for my carelessness. I KNOW BETTER, but I was lazy and blind and now I'm paying for it. Yesterday, my external hard drive crashed. It took with it:

Every family photo from 2006-2011.

Every digital scrapbooking layout for all three of my books. The baby books for the twins were almost done.

All my digital scrapbooking supplies

All my family videos from March until now that I was just getting ready to put on DVD.

Other stuff I can't think of now but will no doubt realize later is indispensible.

Yes, we are taking steps to recover it. Last resort is to send it into a data recovery company, but the first quote I got said it would cost between $600-1900! I about DIED. I don't even have money for groceries--how can I pay that? My husband is working on a plan to use a universal hard drive adapter to access the information, so maybe we can get it working long enough to get most of the information back. On the upside, all my digital scrapbooking supplies are backed up on my hard drive at work, so I can at least get THAT back, though I can't actually scrap anything or use it until I find somewhere to store the files here at home. Some of my family photos are backed up to DVD, but they are all old. Also, I had uploaded my digital scrapbooks to Cherishbound, so although I can't change the files or even access them, I can at least SEE them so I can re-create them if necessary. Most of the videos I lost are still on the video camera, so I can probably get at least a lot of that back as well. (I almost deleted them twice, but felt I shouldn't until they were on DVD. Thank goodness!)

But I thought I would post this experience here as a lesson learned for me and as a prevention for you. Most of you are probably thinking, "You didn't have any BACKUP? Are you CRAZY?" And the answer is: yes I am. I guess I have that "It won't happen to me mentality" which is so stupid because I've had THREE external hard drives die in the past.

So what do I do now? Well, I think I will invest in an INTERNAL hard drive--I got one at work and its so great. But I think I will also invest in Carbonite and start backing everything up online. Its a small price to pay to not go through this again! The main reason I haven't backed stuff up is that I had no space. That's the reason it was all on my external hard drive in the first place. But now I know--make hard copy DVD's. Backup online. Thank goodness I backed up some of it at work. I write this to remind myself--it CAN happen, and be prepared!

And then--we get up this morning and realize we left the garage door open all night. We are so bad about that, but usually one of my awesome helpful neighbors will call us and remind us. This time, no one did (not that it's THEIR fault!) and this morning Trevor's bike was stolen. Yes, it CAN happen to you! Grrr!